


Hush

by equestrianstatue



Series: Tacet [2]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 00:54:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13939104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: "Come on. I need to clear my head."





	Hush

**Author's Note:**

> Set during episode 3x01, Ride.
> 
> An AU of [Tacet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13841943), a slightly canon-divergent AU— so, essentially, just back round again to canon-compliant U. Thursday _doesn't_ come back to the party.

Some air, Bixby thought, a kind of mantra, as he stepped over the threshold of the house into the gardens. Clear the head, calm the mind. Some air. The evening still buzzed hot and relentless in his brain. The familiar post-party exhaustion; the imprint of Kay on his retinas, on his fingertips; the dull ache where Belborough’s fist had hit his jaw. He was all too used to the cool, placid nothingness of feeling that came when the guests went home and the house was quiet. Tonight, he burned.

The fresh air did help, a little, the knife-nip of the breeze cold and welcome now that the garden was empty; but all the same, Bixby’s mind ran on and on in its ouroboric loop. Kay’s face as she had walked into the room, crowned like some Hellenic nymph, and her intake of breath as their eyes met; he had felt it, across a wall of people, as if it had hit the back of his own throat. The press of her body when they had danced: so light, barely brushing against him, but more shockingly present than anything he had known in years. The look in her eyes when Belborough had hit him, her mouth dropping slightly open, in— oh, in all manner of things, he thought. Horrified embarrassment. Concern. Some thrill of pride at seeing him refuse to be intimidated.

By his side, Morse said, “Penny for them.”

“I’m sorry, old man.” Bixby smiled and shook his head. “A stuck record.”

Morse: against all odds, the last man standing. And standing straight enough, although he’d had a drink in hand every time Bixby had seen him earlier that night. He had been unobtrusively silent as they crossed the lawn, walked aimlessly through the little copse of trees and shrubbery that had been fairy-lit for the evening.

Bixby tipped his head back, looked up at the thick slices of night sky through the branches. Then down again to Morse, who was leaning against the trunk of the nearest tree. The lanterns gave his outline a sort of strange, hazy glow.

“It’s all right,” Morse said. “I understand.”

“Do you?” Bixby pushed his hair back from his forehead. Perhaps he ought to have drunk more. Perhaps he ought to have drunk less. As it was, he was balanced here, queasy, wakeful, unsatisfied.

“Try to forget,” Morse said, and before Bixby could interrupt, he said, “No, I know. I mean— just a bit of respite. Or else it consumes you. Forget about her, just for a night.” He paused. “For an hour.”

This snapped Bixby to attention. Morse flicked his eyes away, and then down, seemingly a little surprised at himself.

It was only the next move in the game they’d been playing, tentatively, fairly enjoyably, over the past couple of days. Slow but inexorable, both of them aware of the direction of travel. Both of them with a rogue move or two up their sleeves, to be sure. Kay, for one, had sent tonight in a direction Bixby hadn’t anticipated: he’d planned, of course, for the moment of their meeting, he’d hoped, he’d imagined— but he’d been left reeling. The news that Morse was a policeman, of all things, for another.

The path may have been a little indirect, but now— well, why had Bixby brought them out into the garden? It seemed Morse had an idea. This was two steps forward, taken at a rush, at a run, towards the finish line; although Morse looked rather as if he hadn’t expected to be the one to drag them across it.

“And how do you suggest one goes about that?” asked Bixby.

“Oh, well,” said Morse. His eyes levelled with Bixby’s once again. “There are all sorts of ways.”

Indeed. Bixby took a small, measured step into the space that Morse seemed to hold around himself, and met no resistance.

“On a night like this,” Bixby murmured, “a man might believe anything’s possible,” and he reached out and took the lapel of Morse’s dinner jacket between his finger and thumb. He felt the material, for something to do: the suit was well-made and well-fitted, though close at hand, it was far from new. He looked up. Morse’s face was— expectant.

The kiss was careful, gentle, brief. Morse had closed his eyes. He bit his lip as Bixby pulled away, breathed out slowly through his nose.

“Second thoughts?” asked Bixby, quietly.

Morse shook his head to one side, slid his eyes open again. Swallowed. “I need a drink.”

Back in the study, where they’d left the decanter, he had two. The first he swallowed immediately; the second, he sipped at, cradled against his chest. It seemed to soften him, a little. To rub a few of the angles off.

Bixby poured a measure for himself; it was a poor host who let his guests drink alone, after all. Morse, meanwhile, reached up to undo the bow tie at his own throat, one-handed, and pulled it from his collar. This, too, seemed to lift something from him. When Bixby stood back and let his eyes flick up and down the line of his body, Morse just watched it happen.

“You know, old man, looking the way you do, you must have scores of admirers.”

Morse looked down again, embarrassed, but half-smiling. Flattered. “I don’t know about that.”

“I think you do, rather. I think you’re quite used to attracting attention, and probably to putting it off, too. But with me… well, you liked me as soon as you met me.”

Morse had looked up again, eyebrows raised, the half-smile edging further across his face, and he scoffed, softly.

Bixby shrugged, smiling back. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? I can tell. When you live the way I do, you get very good at reading people. Knowing whether they’re interested in you, or interested in what you might be able to do for them.”

“So?”

“So: why me?”

Morse leaned back against Bixby’s desk. He seemed to give his answer some thought. “You were… not what I expected, I suppose. Disarming.”

Bixby considered this, nodded slowly. “Difficult to disarm, are you?”

Morse’s mouth twitched. “Fairly.”

This time, when Bixby stepped forward, Morse made room. The kiss was longer, deeper, Morse’s mouth soft and warm with Scotch. There was a gentle clinking sound as he put his drink down behind himself on Bixby’s desk, and rested his glass-cold fingertips against the back of Bixby’s neck.

Bixby felt a small, sharp sting of pain: his split lip had re-opened. Morse watched intently as Bixby wiped the beads of blood away with the back of his hand, and then, with the pad of his thumb, the small smear of it caught on Morse’s mouth.

“Would you like to come to bed?” Bixby asked. Morse nodded.

They had their pick of them. There were a dozen bedrooms in the house, all made up for use. Some of them set aside, in fact, for exactly this purpose: one couldn’t hold such parties quite so often without thinking of the practicalities. But Bixby led Morse up two flights of stairs to his own bedroom. He liked the man: it seemed somehow a kind thing to do. And he rather liked the idea of having him in his bed, of being able to remember him having been there.

And what would the memory be? Morse sliding out of his jacket, undressing: not all that much to him, though he had a certain sort of angular grace, if one liked that sort of thing. His fingers fidgeting at his cuffs; his gaze, rather shy and sideways to start with, but fixed enough on the increasing expanse of skin as Bixby removed his own clothes. Morse made a clumsy but eager attempt to finish the job for him when Bixby went to kiss him again, tangling his hands in the hem of his vest, resting them light and warm at his hips as Bixby hummed, pleased, against his mouth.

All Bixby had ever wanted was to please. Natural enough: a childhood spent on stage, striving with every fibre of his small being to make his father happy, to soak up whatever adulation the audience could give them. And then, how he’d wanted more than anything to please Kay, as soon as he met her. She was so hungry, so wanting of something better. He had dreamed of being the person who could give it to her.

Even Conrad, when they were boys. It had been Bixby’s lot to do what he could to cheer him, to remind him of all that existed outside of his small, dark world. He’d brought him things, scavenged for him from the popcorn-sticky fields where they’d set up camp. Lost toys, cigarette cards, loose change. They’d made scrapbooks together in the torchlight of their father’s caravan, a haphazard record of an unending, circular journey around the commons and wastelands of England. But he’d never quite managed to lift the dull, blank misery from Conrad’s face.

Now, of course, he made up for it in style. What was money for, if not to make people happy? It was all he knew how to do with it. To gather this new audience and win them over with whatever it was they needed. Music, dancing, drink, drugs, sheer spectacle. A good time. An escape. Whatever would most please them.

And now here was Morse, who, once Bixby had him on the bed, was just so awfully easy to please. He had a sort of desperate willingness to be touched, leaning into every brush of it, and he was more than content to kiss and be kissed, quite unhurriedly, until he was flushed and messy with it— though when Bixby put his mouth around his cock instead, he made the most wonderful noises, shocked and groaning. Bixby, mindful of his lip, went slowly, carefully, almost meditatively, sinking into the underwater-sensation of it, the rather distant sound of Morse’s uneven breath. When at last he broke the surface, Morse lay taut across the bed, back slightly arched, mouth open, achingly hard.

Not long for this world, Bixby thought, feeling quite fond: but Morse surprised him with an almost stubborn tenacity, and could, it seemed, keep himself strung just that tight for a while yet. Bixby, in turn, found himself buckling more quickly than he had expected when Morse began to touch him again. There was a sort of sincerity about it, an attempt to mean something by it: this was far from lovemaking, but it was a little more than a fuck between strangers, a little more than the sweat and collision of a girl or a boy picked up for the night. Morse didn’t strike him, somehow, as the type— although he’d known well enough what he was doing these past couple of days, and he knew well enough what he was doing now. Not only how to get his warm, careful hand around Bixby’s cock, but how to read the signals of his body, to move at the deliberate, drawn-out pace that Bixby needed. Morse was trying, obviously, earnestly, to please him, to give him what he wanted. The idea rattled warm and rather overwhelming around Bixby’s mind, and struck by it, he pulled Morse’s face back to his. Morse didn’t hesitate to kiss him again, wet and pliable; then he said, “Oh, I can— ” and, manoeuvring himself between Bixby’s legs, went down on him.

In the end, somewhere in the muddle of it all— the arousal; the strange, simple gratitude; Morse’s mouth not inexpert but not particularly practiced; Kay’s face as she’d walked into the room— Bixby came like that, or near enough. He pulled Morse off him just before he did, not sure whether or not he could tell it was imminent, although afterwards the gesture seemed rather redundant. Morse was looking fairly glazed, dazed with his own need, and when Bixby pulled him on top of his body, encouraged him to move against it, he wanted very little persuading. Bixby dragged Morse’s mouth back down to his again, Morse still obligingly, breathlessly opening it for him, shuddering as his cock thrust hard and shallow in the groove of Bixby’s hip. Eventually, Bixby pushed his hand between them and squeezed Morse roughly until he gasped, closed his eyes, and let himself finish.

A hanging moment of unreality, of nothingness: and then Morse collapsed half-on top of him. Bixby breathed out, trailed his fingers lightly over a shoulder blade, before Morse shifted and rolled off to one side. Bixby could find very little to say about any of it, but he turned his head and pressed a brief kiss against one pale shoulder. Morse, eyes shut, smiled faintly.

As far as Bixby was aware, Morse had taken nothing but drink all night. Now, tired, spent and horizontal, and with presumably nothing in the bloodstream to suggest he do otherwise, his breathing began to even out until he was dozing, quietly. Meanwhile, the persistent buzz in the back of Bixby’s skull, though subdued, remained. He sighed. He wouldn’t sleep tonight.

It wasn’t long before he became restless. He swung his legs gently from the bed, rose, and dressed, half-thinking he might go outside— he needed air— but found himself rather unwilling to leave the only warm body left in the house. Instead, taking a cigarette from the dressing-table, he went to the window and cracked it open just enough to feel the breeze.

He leant on the sill and smoked, looking out at the pale gleam of the setting moon, still visible over the trees. Its reflection caught in the lake, trapped under the water. His mind drifted to Kay and Belborough on the opposite shore. He wondered how they’d ended their evening. Perhaps they had fought on the way home, or when they’d arrived. Perhaps the argument had been about him. Or not: perhaps just an icy silence between them. Or, worse, reconciliation. He pinched the bridge of his nose, unclenched his teeth. He’d only ever wanted her to be happy.

Morse woke again after about twenty minutes, bed-flushed and bleary, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, at the sight of Bixby up and dressed at the window, “I didn’t mean to…”

“Not on my account, old man. Sleep as long as you like.”

“No, if you’re up…”

Dragging his mind back into the room, Bixby watched Morse cast about the floor for his clothes, fit himself back into the starch of his shirt.

“So,” he said, as Morse pulled on his socks, “who is it you’re looking to forget?”

With his head bent, the way Morse tensed was almost imperceptible— but not quite. “It’s not like that.”

“No?” said Bixby, idly. “Who is it you can’t have, then?”

Morse looked up, and gave him something that was presumably meant to be a smile. “If you wanted to get into all that… well, we haven’t really the time.”

“We’ve got all night, I’d have thought.”

“Hardly. The sun’ll be up soon enough.”

Feeling disinclined to needle, Bixby let it be. He offered Morse a cigarette, which after a little consideration Morse accepted: something of a conciliatory gesture, Bixby thought. He came to the window and let Bixby light it for him— a small, lingering intimacy— and then stood next to him at the sill.

“Quite the view,” he said. “The whole kingdom.”

Bixby wondered what he saw. Whether he was impressed. Envious. Contemptuous. Morse with his best suit worn a little shiny at the elbows and knees; the odd roundedness of the vowels that sat heavy on his tongue. Bixby knew an ill-fitting costume when he saw one.

He felt suddenly stifled again, his collar tight, the room humid and over-warm. “Let’s go back out,” he said. “If you’re going to be up, then let’s. Come down to the lake.”

Morse shrugged. “All right. Why not.”

Some air, he thought, again: it couldn’t hurt.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/171768914522/hush-equestrianstatue-endeavour-tv-archive)!


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